Robert Evans

So part of why that becomes more common in this period is scientists trying to figure out if there's a link between smoking and lung cancer.

The scientists who write that 1928 study, Herbert Lombard and Carl During, carried out their own small 200-person study with a control group.

And this is the first good quality study we have that shows lung cancer is – it shows a bunch of things.

Number one – I shouldn't say shows.

It suggests a bunch of things.

that lung cancer is not a contagious disease, which how would you have known that, you know, without scientific data?

You don't know that people aren't giving it to each other, right?

That it's not some weird thing that people got when they started walking in the Amazon or whatever, right?

How would you know?

They know, or at least the data suggests that it's also, there's not a correlation between lung cancer and low quality housing, which was another thing people didn't

It's something about the way we insulate our homes.

You know, they also find out that it's not associated with constipation, which was a thing that some doc.

And again, we can laugh about that.

But how would you know if you didn't do the study?

Yeah, right.

Yeah.

One of the primary like damning thing the study finds is that self-reported heavy smokers are 27 percent likelier to get lung cancer.

This is the first scientifically solid evidence linking cigarettes to lung cancer.

Now, 200-person study with a 200-person control group, that's not definitive, right?

That's enough to justify further research, sure, but that's not a huge study.